By Guy Dinmore
Financial Times, 08 February 2007
While the US is focusing public attention on Iran with accusations of its destabilising role in Iraq, analysts in Washington warn that all Iraq's neighbours are becoming more deeply involved in covert activities that fuel the sectarian conflict.
Funds and weapons originating in Saudi Arabia are still reaching Sunni groups and al-Qaeda, sometimes routed through Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey is becoming more active in north Iraq as it prepares to help the Turkmen minority in a looming confrontation over the future of the Kurdish-claimed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
The Bush administration, however, wants the spotlight focused on Iran and not on its allies in the region. The Sunni-dominated Gulf Arab states are being pushed by Washington to form a broad anti-Iranian alliance with the US, even - as former officials point out - at the risk of provoking a wider Sunni-Shia conflict in the Islamic world.
A senior US official told the Financial Times that the administration would soon go ahead with a twice-postponed presentation of "evidence" that would demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Iran was arming Shia factions in Iraq and providing explosives used against US forces.
"Sophisticated hardware is coming across the border. It would be hard for Iran to have plausible deniability," he alleged, describing Iranian armour-penetrating explosives and "brand new" Katyusha rockets.
Iran denies the charges and the credibility of the US claims have been widely challenged in Washington. Concerns that the US is on course for a military confrontation with Iran intensified following the capture by US forces last month of five Iranians in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil. Iran has accused the US of being involved in Sunday's abduction of one of its diplomats in Baghdad. It was announced yesterday that four Iraqi military officers had been arrested in connection with the kidnap of the diplomat.
Stephen Hadley, the nat-ional security adviser, last week explained the postponement of the show of evidence, saying the White House thought the intelligence briefing was "overstated". He did not elaborate but said the administration first wanted to produce the comprehensive 90-page Nat-ional Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which it published last Friday. The brief ex-tr-acts released to the public accus-ed Iran of providing "lethal support" to Shia militants. Syria was accused of helping former ruling Ba'athists and not stopping the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.
Saudi Arabia was not mentioned in the extracts. The senior US official told the FT Saudi Arabia had taken steps to reduce cross-border flows. He agreed with the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton report's conclusions that the Sunni insurgency was being funded by private Saudi and other Gulf Arab "individuals".
"Foreign intervention at the covert level is proceeding apace in Iraq," the independent Brookings Institution reported last month, warning of looming proxy wars. Quoting "American and Iraqi sources", the report says Iran has several thousand agents in Iraq who have funnelled guns and money to friendly Shia groups, establishing "an extensive network of safe houses, arms caches, communications channels...proxy fighters" ready to wage a clandestine war.
"The Sunni powers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Turkey are all frightened by Iran's growing influence and presence inside Iraq and are scrambling to catch up," it said.
Sue Kelly, a Republican member of Congress from 1995 until last month and chair of the House financial services oversight and investigations subcommittee, has been active in fighting the "silent war" of terrorist funding. She says she encountered internal obstacles in tackling Washington's Gulf Arab allies.
Bureaucratic struggles, combined with inattention and government inertia, have dragged back progress in blocking terrorist funding, she says. The US has a "complicated co-dependency with Saudi Arabia", she told the Hudson Institute think-tank. She said her investigations into broader terrorism funding took her to Riyadh, where she discovered that the kingdom's "financial intelligence unit", which the State Department claimed existed, was merely an "empty floor in a building".
Progress was made later, she added. She intended to follow up a year ago but said the State Department blocked a visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates because "someone" did not want to disrupt the "co-operative alliance".
Danielle Pletka, a senior analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, supports Saudi Arabia's assertions that the government does not fund Sunni insurgents. However, she calls claims that they cannot exert control over individual Saudi funding of terrorists "ridiculous".
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Citation: Guy Dinmore. "All Iraq's neighbours 'are fuelling conflict'," Financial Times, 08 February 2007.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/49c2102c-b719-11db-8bc2-0000779e2340.html
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